Game Director Letter – January 2014

Hi everyone, Senior Designer Matthew Bennett here filling in for Joel again this month, before he makes a glorious return in a few days.

As the stars start to align in the east to mark the coming of the third portent I'll quote directly from the Astromancer “...and in the narrow streets and ways, death stalks with claws of ebony...”.

We're pleased to announce that the next world boss, which will start its rampage on the 5th of February and is one of my personal favorite AoC creatures, will be spawning with greater frequency than those before it in order to reduce waiting times and the need for instance switching. We have also added a reset mechanic for murder points that are gained while fighting the boss, as long as you are actively on the boss' threat list murder points will not be kept.

This month I'm going to talk about our more recent patch and the follow up to that, as well as an exciting brand new feature! Work on the Palace of Cetriss and The Slithering Chaos is progressing well and the upcoming crafting system also reached another milestone.

We have now given all existing items (an astronomical number and a gigantic process) salvage tables, allowing them to be broken down into crafting materials. This was needed so everything which can be looted in-game has the potential to be made into needed pieces for the upcoming crafting recipes. Finishing this milestone was a huge data task and it moves us a big step closer to finishing the tradeskill revamp.

PvP Gear

In our latest patch we released greatly improved versions of all our current PvP weapons. This now means that the top tier of PvP weapons are a much more viable choice for PvP when compared to even the best PvE acquired weapons. This release also included improvements to the lower tiers of PvP weapons to bring the stats much closer to the highest PvP tier and reduce the level requirements for purchasing them, making them easier to acquire.

This is the first step in trying to reduce the power gap between casual and veteran PvP players. Even characters fresh to level 80 will now have the opportunity to deal out very decent damage in the PvP environment. This does include improvements to those entry level PvP weapons available via the Item Store.

The next step in this gear redistribution is to apply the same process to the existing PvP Armors and Accessories. This process has already begun internally and we will be pushing the initial changes out to the Test Live server soon, along with some events to encourage any many of you as possible to drop in and check out the changes.

The final step in this process of re-balancing existing PvP gear will be to add a conversion trader where you will be able to trade in your Campaign Badges for Conquest Trophies, this is so that it is possible to acquire all the existing PvP gear solely through Mini-Games if that is how you want to play.

All New Daily Quests

We are working on a brand new systems which will give everyone the opportunity to do daily location quests. These will use the same kind of automated process we have been able to add for the world bosses and make quests available based upon time and date. This should allow us to create exciting new content that changes from Day to Day and encourages people to come together in the same parts of Hyboria.

These quests give players new reasons, in the form of great content and rewards, to travel across Hyboria from day to day and perhaps revisit some of the old, but beautiful, landscapes they only encountered while leveling.

This system also allows us to create new PvP oriented open world quests by concentrating the population onto specific zones based upon time and date and providing goals such as killing a certain number of players within a specific adventure zone or more survival oriented challenges like delivering an item from A to B without dying and without the use of local travel.

Additionally we are looking at making some improvements to the loot gained from the World Boss events both in terms of acquisition and items on offer.

Enjoy the slaughter the third portent promises and I hope to see some of you soon for the Test Live events.